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New They have whitelists
The support issues are very real, and costly.
New See above
Also, let me inform you of a very simple term.

Cost of doing business.

If you say you are providing a service, then you have to provide it. Very simple. If you can't afford to provide it based on the cost structure that does not include a mechanism for getting people what they paid for (requested message, not spam), then don't FUCKING PRETEND to provide it.

Tell people you are going to filter their messages based on any content you don't approve of. Very simple. Do it in VERY LARGE TYPE on the contract though, with simple to understand examples.
Expand Edited by crazy Sept. 29, 2010, 06:15:17 PM EDT
New Re: See above
http://www.t-mobile....itions&print=true
We use filters to block spam messages, but we do not guarantee that you will not receive spam or other unsolicited messages, and we are not liable for such messages. Additional blocking options are available at www.my.T-Mobile.com.
snip
"spamming" or engaging in other abusive or unsolicited communications, or any other mass, automated voice or data communication for commercial or marketing purposes;
last sentence covers it and the user had agreed to abide by the term of service.
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
New Which is it?
The way I read it, there are three types of prohibited messages, any one of which can get you blocked:

1. abusive

2. unsolicited

3. mass, automated voice or data communication for commercial or marketing purposes

In this case the users requested the messages. So it can't be unsolicited. It's theoretically possible someone could see the actual content as abusive, but I doubt it, and certainly haven't heard anyone claim it.

That leaves the third case, which seems to require all of three conditions to apply:

1. mass

2. automated

3. for commercial or marketing purposes

Automated? Yes. Commercial or marketing purposes? Yes. Mass? Not by any definition I can think of. One person requests it, one person gets it.

If I've mis-read the ToS, please show me how.
--

Drew
New Mass, one or more automated messages
no thumbs thumbing involved
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
New So... me sending...
Sending My Phone Cron'd messages from my host in Troy, Michigan at specific hours are automated.

What about my Nagios Pages from my monitoring system? I can get HUNDREDS in 15 minutes from it on bad days.

What about Notices I get sent from our notification system...

What about Google sending me notifications about meetings or Facebook sending me SMS on status updates?

Ummm, a little bit more help defining prohibited items... and how come my stuff works, Google's, Facebook's and other? They are all automated... and 3 out of the 4 deliver huge amounts of messages.

Explain it to me better Master Shredder.
New just because the carrier allows you to abuse their TOS
doesnt mean they cannot enforce it later
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
New If he pays for the service
of sending and receiving unlimited text, why would getting any amount be an abuse of their TOS?
Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But...there they are.
New And I do pay for unlimited.
New Re: If he pays for the service
unlimited "non automated" text. Currently they have the bandwidth to carry what he is sending and receiving. If it becomes problematical like ATT they will start lowering the boom
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
New Selective enforcement...
This is exactly the issue.
New Technical solution that proves this is bogus
They clearly have the ability to flag "automated" messages, which you're (Box, not Greg) now saying is the issue. Just flag them as automated in the queue.

"SELECT * FROM queue ORDER BY flag, timestamp"

Presto, all non-automated messages go before any non-automated messages. Bandwidth problem becomes a non-issue. Buyers and senders of automated messages decide whether the delay makes the service unusable or not.

Choosing specific senders and specific messages to completely block takes them out of safe harbor provisions.
--

Drew
New I don't have a problem with...
reducing priority of the mass of messages...

But he keeps saying they CAN block what the hell ever they want even if the people subscribed to the message service.

Personally, since SMS is still effectively free for transmission for the Cellphone companies... (maybe not handling and queuing)
New whats this free shyte?
http://www.developer...tewayProvComp.asp
to get from a computer to you phone you need a gateway, they are not cheap to buy or run.
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
New Ok jackass...
I said the handling and queuing. That is indeed where the Gateways are.

Please *READ*.

The transmission costs are ultimately nil.

The costs buy *AND* run them have come down by orders magnitude.

Think back to pagers gateways... one of those... cost a few million dollars for a 64 channel, 120 phone line system, just to get the messages onto the network.

Nowadays the effective cost (based on numbers of message being sent and bandied around as costs for gateways) has dropped to about 0.005% of the cost per message handling from 1999.
New Speaking of Nagios
I've personally blocked quite a few hosts that have poorly configured nagios systems that have sent notifications just as fast as the computer(s) can send them. To be sure, we tend to do so for a short length of time, but they fit the definition mooted above and were completely responsible for denying the use of the service by others because they've attempted to mail us several hundred times a minute.

Are we supposed to not do this, despite the fact that I'm sure the subscriber(s) in question probably became very relieved when their phone stopped ringing every couple of seconds?
New Preventing use of the service by others is covered in ToS
It's a DOS attack. Intentional or not, I don't hear anyone opposed to blocking that.
--

Drew
New We are not using the ...
direct to SMS delivery.

We use the SMTP gateway, which is a "natural" throttle.
New Yes, that is the part of the infrastructure that I run
and it amounted to a DoS attack on it when a Canadian uni had a badly configured set of Nagios boxes run wild last week. Sure, it's a natural throttle, but when the mail server is throttling it, it's throttling everybody else using it as well.
New I'm sorry... I should have said...
*MY* outbound mail server for our nagios system (it delivers it locally to the machine's SMTP Agent) does not do batch mode. It also does *not* send out 150 messages, using 150 connections at the same time to the same MX records. Its purposely setup to do them all serially.

Sure, I sometimes get a few hundred messages in 15 minutes. But every single one of them is sent ... singly and one at a time to the same MX record.

Now, if my nagios server needs to send out messages to a few AT&T recipients, a few Verizon recipients, a few T-Mobile recipients and a few Rogers recipients all at once, there will be multiple mail drops happening at the same time to each MX, but serially for those MX records.

I guess, I thought through this a bit more than others, as I am the recipient of some Denial of Service attacks... I didn't want to be a perp.

Many people don't test and just assume things are good.

I also, once I have an incident... I turn off notifications... until the event is past.

I guess I'm not the norm.
New We only send to those that are supposed to...
And they are definitely responsible for the systems they are notified for.

We use the SMTP gateways to not overwhelm the services. (10digitnum@vtext.com... etc... 1234567890@rogers.com) and we deliver singly, not in batch mode.

Verizon delivers in mere seconds. AT&T delays up to 30 minutes. T-Mobile doesn't delay more than a minute. Rogers is also near instantaneous.

Dunno. But this is not that tough.
New Possible SES?
That's "Shit's Easy Syndrome". You obviously know way more about it than I do, but Box does do this for a living. Easy for you doesn't necessarily mean easy for him, and I don't like making promises on other people's efforts.

However ... I still say if you can prioritize it, and they can, that that's all you need to do. Automated messages always get last priority, problem solved.

Here's my assumption, by the way: Once the hardware and software is in place to do this at all (including the gateway Box mentions), I assume that the incremental cost of each message approaches zero until you reach saturation of some part of the system and have to increase capacity. Is that a valid assumption?
--

Drew
New headcount doesnt approach zero
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
New Actually, prioritizing automated messages last
would be a terrible idea. Automated messages make up the majority of all legitimate messages we handle... and they are generally considered very important by the customers that use them. We get to hear about it sometimes when they're delayed by ten minutes; some very major Canadian inet services use us to notify their employees of problems.
New Heh
Rogers is the smtp gateway that I actually admin.
New Look at the post where I explained...
My setup to not become a DoS.

http://iwt.mikevital....iwt?postid=36671
New Just did read that
and no, you're not the norm. Well, semi norm? I guess most people have it set up alright, but the ones that don't end up causing us huge problems, so we really get to notice those ones.
New You've missed the other key point
Entry points into a wireless network are neither infinitely available, nor free. To be sure, you can have a LOT of shortcodes available, but they're not infinite. The problem here is that the TOS with the party offering the short codes to third parties explicitly signed a contract saying they needed approval from T-Mobile for any new services they'd offer on one of the short codes they have assigned to them. They did not do so, so T-Mobile cut them off.

I'm not sure why this is a problem here.
New freetards is the problem
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
New The problem is box miscategorised it
Which then became the focus point.

Not "freetards".

I don't expect shit for free, I expect to get what I pay for. And in this case, maybe the source of the message is subject to the contract, which in turn means I can't ask for the message via the shortlist code. Fine.

According to box, he should be able to block ANY automated commercial message. Like Facebook's text to your phone to confirm a password reset. Or any other automated list request. And they also want to pick and choose on political speech.

The answer to that is no. And it has nothing to do with wanting something for nothing.
     so people should be allowed to spam sms - (boxley) - (62)
         Where do you see spam? - (scoenye) - (57)
             not the point - (boxley) - (56)
                 But this case has nothing to do with spam - (scoenye) - (55)
                     He does - (crazy) - (54)
                         sort of - (boxley) - (53)
                             Please - (crazy) - (52)
                                 is the judges ruling narrow or broad? - (boxley) - (3)
                                     Poor dodge - (crazy) - (2)
                                         nope, wrong question - (boxley) - (1)
                                             Huh? - (crazy)
                                 It is asked for - (scoenye)
                                 Yeah, as a person in a similar line of work - (jake123) - (46)
                                     You know what it comes down to? - (static)
                                     That is what we currently have - (scoenye) - (44)
                                         Dude, I don't think you realise - (jake123) - (43)
                                             Give them a whitelist - (crazy) - (32)
                                                 can we give the users your phone number for support? - (boxley) - (1)
                                                     Free? No - (crazy)
                                                 They have whitelists - (jake123) - (29)
                                                     See above - (crazy) - (28)
                                                         Re: See above - (boxley) - (27)
                                                             Which is it? - (drook) - (26)
                                                                 Mass, one or more automated messages - (boxley) - (22)
                                                                     So... me sending... - (folkert) - (21)
                                                                         just because the carrier allows you to abuse their TOS - (boxley) - (8)
                                                                             If he pays for the service - (beepster) - (2)
                                                                                 And I do pay for unlimited. -NT - (folkert)
                                                                                 Re: If he pays for the service - (boxley)
                                                                             Selective enforcement... - (folkert) - (4)
                                                                                 Technical solution that proves this is bogus - (drook) - (3)
                                                                                     I don't have a problem with... - (folkert) - (2)
                                                                                         whats this free shyte? - (boxley) - (1)
                                                                                             Ok jackass... - (folkert)
                                                                         Speaking of Nagios - (jake123) - (11)
                                                                             Preventing use of the service by others is covered in ToS - (drook) - (3)
                                                                                 We are not using the ... - (folkert) - (2)
                                                                                     Yes, that is the part of the infrastructure that I run - (jake123) - (1)
                                                                                         I'm sorry... I should have said... - (folkert)
                                                                             We only send to those that are supposed to... - (folkert) - (6)
                                                                                 Possible SES? - (drook) - (2)
                                                                                     headcount doesnt approach zero -NT - (boxley)
                                                                                     Actually, prioritizing automated messages last - (jake123)
                                                                                 Heh - (jake123) - (2)
                                                                                     Look at the post where I explained... - (folkert) - (1)
                                                                                         Just did read that - (jake123)
                                                                 You've missed the other key point - (jake123) - (2)
                                                                     freetards is the problem -NT - (boxley)
                                                                     The problem is box miscategorised it - (crazy)
                                             To put this wreck back on the rails... - (scoenye) - (9)
                                                 try reading the link - (boxley) - (8)
                                                     Someone aleady quoted that - (drook) - (7)
                                                         one more time, if the ruling goes against - (boxley) - (6)
                                                             A pleading doesn't determine the ruling. - (Another Scott) - (2)
                                                                 if the ruling states they MUST deliver it does exactly that -NT - (boxley) - (1)
                                                                     And if wishes were horses ... We'll see. -NT - (Another Scott)
                                                             Please answer these two simple questions - (drook) - (2)
                                                                 Re: Please answer these two simple questions - (boxley) - (1)
                                                                     Hear that - (crazy)
         Settled out of court. - (folkert) - (1)
             good, having that albatross going the wrong way would be bad - (boxley)
         So should T-Mobile go to jail for bank robbery now? - (crazy) - (1)
             Freakin' awesome! - (folkert)

Give a man a fish, and chances are you won't be asked to be in charge of buying a gift ‘from all of us’ anymore.
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